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I don’t buy many pairs (really!), but that is only because I value comfort over looks, and most cute/pretty/sexy/awesome shoes hurt too much. Largely because most women’s shoes have those &^%#$$#ing HEELS on them that force your feet/legs into uncomfortable, unnatural postures. No thank you.

Flat shoes and boots are really not that easy to come by. And flat shoes or boots with a flexible, comfortable sole are really rare.

So for quite some time I have been thinking it would be really neat to have one pair of awesomely comfortable “base” shoes, with a thousand and one different tops for them. As in, today I want green corduroy, but this evening maybe something shiny and black, so I’ll just peel off the corduroy covers and stick on the leather.

I have just started to work out how shoes (normal shoes) are put together. They are impressively complicated, which is no surprise, though it is a little dismaying.

I mean, you have to start out with flat material, cut into a shape that, when curved around an odd-shaped base, with form the right kind of three-dimensional form. Feet are not a nice, regular sort of prism.

And they MOVE. Your feet flatten and widen when you step onto them, plus they bend. This makes constructing a container for them kind of tricky, when said container is made of anything stiffer and less stretchy than knitting.

I have a pair of very pretty, sequined and beaded slip-ons. They’re too small; it hurts to put them on for even a few seconds, despite the fact that they are actually my size (lies, all LIES I tell you!). However, they are very, very simple in construction, so they seem like an excellent way to get started with patterns.

Except that the sole is almost perfectly symmetrical. And are feet symmetrical?

No, they are not.

So transferring the vamp (that’s the bit that wraps around the front of your foot) and the heel patterns to a sole that more closely resembles a real foot, that doesn’t work so well. You wind up with an unattractive bulge over your foot.

While searching for shoe making patterns, I found this post, which had one pattern that looks like it might work for my purposes, more or less. Haven’t tried it out yet, as I am still fighting with the sparkly shoe pattern as well as one I made up.

As for the other tricky part of this project, I haven’t done more than start thinking of ways the shoe covers might fit to the base.